photo by Peter Nicholson

Lowell Handler is a photographer, filmmaker, and author whose pictures have appeared in Life, Newsweek, Elle, U.S. News & World Report, The (London) Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s magazines, as well as many journals from Brazil to Japan.

Handler served as associate producer, narrator, presenter, co-writer, and photographer for the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary “Twitch and Shout,” which won the San Francisco International Film Festival and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lowell also wrote a memoir of the same name, about his life with Tourette syndrome, (Penguin 1998). He has directed two short documentary films, (Terefu and Her Children, and Bernardo and Veronica), and released an eBook, “Crazy and Proud,” that includes a video he produced.

Lowell worked on the tenured faculty at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY, where he was an educator from 2000 to 2020. Lowell held the position of associate professor of photography and the Greenspan Trust-Handel Foundation Endowed Chair in Holocaust and Genocide Studies for the 2015-2016 academic year. He also sits on the advisory board of Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health in NY, a non-profit helping people living with developmental disabilities, autism, and their families.

Lowell was the technical consultant and set photographer on the film Niagara, Niagara starring Robin Tunney and Henry Thomas, the still photographer on Gary Winick’s feature The Tic Code, starring Gregory Hines, and partial inspiration for the touretting detective, played by Ed Norton in the film Motherless Brooklyn, (Nov. 2019) based on Jonathan Lethem’s novel.

Handler is featured in Ric Burns new PBS documentary film Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, and in Sacks’ last posthumous book release Everything in its Place, (Knopf April 2019) which includes a chapter called “Travels with Lowell” that chronicles their trips together throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Terefu and Her Children, a short documentary about a family of Ethiopian Jews in Israel, directed by Lowell is being distributed by WGBH on YouTube.